Lacy Eye (11 page)

“I'm living in the wrong house is what I mean,” she said to me calmly. “You and Daddy aren't my real parents. Iris isn't my sister.”

The light changed and I drove on, knowing I should ask her what she meant. But I didn't.
Probably just the standard “I'm really a princess” fantasy
, I remember thinking.
Better to leave her alone and let her enjoy it
. Why press reality on a five-year-old if she wanted to pretend for a while?

The “fantasy persona” she inhabited when she was older—that of a young woman who came from wealth, and who was accustomed to a life of luxury—was almost certainly the one Dawn presented to most of the people she met when she went to college (as far as I could tell, the only exception was Opal). The students who testified about the lies she'd told provided ample evidence of that.

We didn't know it at the time, but at his trial it became clear that when Rud Petty accompanied Dawn to Iris's rehearsal dinner, he thought he was carrying an heiress on his arm. The whole evening, Dawn just
shone
. If strangers had walked in and been asked to guess which young woman at the table was scheduled to walk down the aisle the next day, they probably would have pointed to the maid of honor.

I saw Claire watching the whole scene with an expression that I took at first to be amusement, before I recognized it as concern and decided to look away. Iris and Archie went off with some of their college friends after the dinner, while Rud and Dawn returned with us to the house. I tensed as we all said good night, expecting an argument from Dawn about where Rud would sleep, but when Joe carried Rud's bag down the hall and deposited it in the guest room, Rud shook his hand and thanked him, saying he'd be happy to make pancakes in the morning, if we didn't mind turning the kitchen over to him.

Kissing me good night outside her bedroom, Dawn whispered, “Mommy, isn't he great?” and because I felt relieved that the evening was over, I was more effusive than I might have been otherwise.

“He's perfect, honey,” I told her, of course having no idea how those words would come to haunt me in only a few months.

The next morning, Joe was up before any of us. While most of the time he did his best to avoid eating sugar or even having it in the house, when he felt nervous he went overboard in the other direction, so I wasn't surprised when he went out early and returned with a box of pastries from Caprice, telling Rud, no offense, he'd let him make pancakes next time, but this morning was his treat. I watched Dawn beam when her father mentioned a “next time” for Rud, and as Joe held the box open to her, she shook her head and said she thought she'd have a boiled egg instead. Rud gave her an approving look, and it was the first time something bothered me about him; she seemed to be saying it to him more than the rest of us, and I sensed it had to do with her wanting to keep her weight down to please him. I checked to see if Joe had also noticed, but I knew it was a sign of his anxiety that he was digging into the first of two cherry Danishes with a look of agitated bliss on his rash-pocked face.

Shortly afterward, the people Iris and I had hired—caterers, florists, hairdressers—began arriving, and the house erupted in activity. At the height of it, I noticed that Abby seemed more excited than usual, and looking closer, I saw that she was drooling, which was not like her, even on a particularly hot day, which this was not. Her movements appeared uncoordinated, as if her mind were having trouble telling her body what to do. Beneath her coat, it seemed as if she might be suffering muscle spasms.

Actually, I wasn't the one who first noticed the dog's apparent distress—it was Rud. “Does she always do that?” he asked me as I passed through the living room. He pointed at where Abby lay, in her favorite patch of sunlight beneath the kitchen window.

“Oh, my God.” As I approached Abby and put a hand out, she gave a groan as if to ask,
Aren't you going to help me?
I called for Joe, but before he could get there, Rud was kneeling beside me, touching the dog's flank.

“I think it's poison,” Rud said, keeping his voice low. “Wait here with her. I'll be right back.” Then Joe was beside me, and, my voice shaking, I told him what Rud had said.

“That's crazy,” Joe told me. “Poisoned with what? How?” When Rud returned carrying a bag he'd retrieved from the trunk of Dawn's car, we made room for him at Abby's side. “We don't keep chemicals where she could get to them,” Joe said to Rud. “Do you think we're crazy? It's not poison. It must be some kind of disease.”

“It's poison,” Rud said quietly, in such a way that it came across without showing disrespect to Joe's claim. “I've seen it before, trust me. Did she go outside today?”

Joe and I looked at each other. Usually I took Abby out for a walk in the morning, but this morning I'd been too preoccupied, so Joe had clipped her leash to the run in the backyard. “Emmett,” we said simultaneously, as Rud began rummaging in the veterinary bag. Joe added, “I'm going to kill that kid,” and he creaked to a standing position, aiming himself toward the back door and the Furths' house.

As angry as I also felt at Emmett, I told Joe to wait. “Not now,” I murmured, nodding at Abby, who whimpered in protest as Rud's hand clamped something inside her mouth. “Abby needs us. Besides, if we go over there and accuse Emmett now, he'll ruin our day.”

“Well, shouldn't we at least call the vet?”

“It looks like we don't have to. Rud works in a vet's office; he knows what he's doing.”

Behind him, Dawn sneaked up and put a hand on Rud's shoulder. He yelled and threw her hand off with a violent yank of his arm. For a moment Dawn stood stock still, looking as if he'd smacked her, and Rud apologized. “Sorry, Kitten,” he said, reaching to pull her toward him. “You know I don't like to be surprised like that.” I tried not to notice that the way he embraced her didn't look natural. It looked as if someone had ordered him to strike a pose of a loving boyfriend.

“What's going on?” she asked, seeing that we were all gathered around the panting dog. I knew it took a lot for her to do that, because what she'd been hoping for was that we'd all say how beautiful she looked. She'd been with the bridesmaids upstairs in Iris's bedroom, which had been turned into a pre-wedding beauty salon, having her hair and makeup done for the ceremony. In her cornflower-blue dress, with her hair shaped into an updo, she did look as nice as I'd ever seen her, though
beautiful
wasn't the word anyone being honest would have used.

Rud tried to make up for his outburst by telling her she was a babe. Before Dawn could respond, Abby's breath as she lay at our feet became more and more agonized, and for a few horrifying seconds, it sounded as if it might stop altogether.

“Wait!” Dawn took off like a shot—or she tried to, anyway; even love can't cure clumsiness, and she had to kick off her shoes after only a few steps, because she wasn't used to wearing heels. As I bent down to rub Abby's forehead, and found that this soothed her breathing to a slower pace, we heard Dawn upstairs in our bedroom overhead, then the sounds of her clumping back down the stairs to us.

“Here!” she cried, thrusting something at Abby's face, and I saw that it was Joe's inhaler she was pressing up against the dog's mouth. Abby reared her head back to get away from it, and Joe reached to grab Dawn's arm.

“Are you crazy?” he screeched at her. It was seldom that he ever lost control, so when he did, he sounded like a different person.

“What?” Dawn said. I thought she might have been frightened by her father's reaction, but she seemed only confused.

“That won't work on a
dog
! What's the
matter
with you?”

At first I thought he would apologize right away, especially because Dawn looked so stricken. When he didn't, I thought she might allow herself to feel anger.

But instead, what showed on her face was a measure of mortification I'd never seen there before. Not when she came home crying that the kids were making fun of her lazy eye; not when Cecilia Baugh tricked her into going to a party that didn't exist; not when Emmett Furth called to ask her to the junior prom and for a split second she thought he was serious, before realizing it was a prank

“Sorry, Daddy,” she mumbled, and I could see that he was about to tell her he was sorry, too, when Abby began choking again as she tried to take in air.

“Thank God we have Rud here,” I said, to change the subject, and I knew Joe was feeling the same dismay I felt when Dawn betrayed her anxiety by kneeling to bite her boyfriend's shoulder as he bent over the dog. He showed us a pill in his hand, then forced it into Abby's mouth and held her snout up so it would go down her gullet.

I asked him what the pill was. “Charcoal. We need her to vomit.” Rud spoke calmly. “Is there a place I can be alone with her, somewhere out of the way? I'll take care of her.” Seeming to forget that he'd told us he had a back injury and couldn't lift anything, he bent down to gather Abby up in the rug she lay on, and followed Joe down to the basement. A half hour later, while Joe and I were dressing, Rud came back upstairs and said, “She's okay. She got rid of it all. Whatever that kid Emmett fed her, it did a number on her gut. You should take her to your vet for a follow-up this week, but the worst is over.”

To show my gratitude I went to give him a hug, noticing how tense his body was in receiving it. I backed away quickly, and Joe shook his hand. We passed the next few hours in the pleasure of knowing that our older daughter was marrying the man she loved—and whom we loved for her—under a sky that was bluer and brighter than she'd dared to wish for. Walking in front of her sister down the garden aisle toward the bower of red and yellow roses, Dawn seemed to have regained her composure. She smiled at Joe and me going by, and I know we both felt glad of it. When Iris and Archie exchanged their vows, Joe reached down for my hand and squeezed it, and though I tried not to, I felt myself shudder with sobs.

After the ceremony, we all posed for pictures. When the photographer called for the family to come up, I saw Dawn grab Rud's hand as she pulled him toward the newlyweds and Joe and me. I watched Iris start to protest, but then she relented as she caught the expression on her sister's face—pleading as if to say,
Do this for me, okay?

The reception began with laughter and dancing under the tent for the grown-ups, while the children played at the side of the yard, near the maple where the tree house used to be. Even after all these years, you could still see traces of black in the branches where the fire singed the bark. I didn't know exactly what was going on until I ventured over, beyond the actual perimeter of the garden, to take a look. Someone had taken out the croquet set from the garage and arranged the wickets around the yard, and the kids were having a field day with it, smacking balls without any idea, it seemed, that the goal was to send them through in a certain order.

The croquet set had never been opened from its original package, though it had sat in the garage for more than twenty years, since the day Joe's parents drove out from Tonawanda, shortly after we moved into the house, and gave it to us as a housewarming present. I was pleased when Joe pulled off the paper wrapped sloppily around the bulky gift, even though I could tell he was wary of doing so. His father was already on the third Genesee Cream Ale of the six-pack he'd brought with him and insisted on drinking from the can, despite the mug I'd put in the freezer to frost for him.

“That's so nice!” I exclaimed when the croquet set was revealed, aware of adding heartiness to my voice as I tried to defuse the tension I felt mounting in the room. Joe's mother, who like my own didn't speak much when her husband was around, smiled wanly and said she hoped we'd enjoy it.

Joe thanked his parents, and I saw that he wanted it to end there. But, of course, it didn't. “You're moving up in the world, son,” his father said, gesturing around him at our new four-bedroom house with hands scarred from years of work accidents at Lackawanna Steel. He never held a steady job after the plant let him go when Joe was in junior high, and those hands never healed. “We couldn't just give you any old thing. You're a king now. You should be playing the sport of kings.”

“You don't need to be a king to play croquet, Dad.” Joe had considered not answering, I knew, but then couldn't resist. “I think you mean polo.”

“Whuh-oh! I stand corrected.” His father rubbed those gnarled hands together as if Joe had given him something he'd been waiting a long time for. “Far be it from me to try to educate Mr. Graduate Degree, hunh, Tilda?” He looked to his wife for affirmation, and Joe's mother flushed.

“It doesn't matter,” she said, wringing her hands in her lap, and I passed the plate of deviled eggs so she'd have something else to do with them. She took one and in a desperate whisper added, “It doesn't matter, Len.” Years later, after they were killed together when a snowplow didn't see their car around a high bank and carved into their Cutlass, it took me longer than I would have liked to shake the memory of her saying, “It doesn't matter, Len,” as if she would have given all she had to make him stop needling their son about his success, and just have a nice visit for a change.

At Iris's wedding reception, Rud Petty had appointed himself in charge of the croquet game. I walked over to see him encouraging the kids gathered around him to swing away at the heavy, colorful balls. Claire and Hugh Danzig's daughter, Kirsten, hung on his every word; it was obvious she had a crush on him.

Standing behind her, he wrapped her small fingers around the top of a mallet. “Pretend this is someone you hate,” Rud told her, pointing down at the orange ball in the grass. “You gotta smack it like it did something bad to you.” To illustrate, he whacked the ball and sent it flying into the Furths' backyard as Kirsten squealed with delight. I had to step in and ask him not to be so “enthusiastic”—I chose the word carefully—and seeming abashed, he apologized and laughed at himself, saying he must not know his own strength. Kirsten glared at me.